


No time to wallow in the mire

by JaqofSpades



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Multi, TSC Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-26 22:16:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5022592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miles finds demons hiding behind every door in Drexel's mansion.  He looks at Charlie, and remembers a too-young whore wearing the same dress.  He thinks of Nora, and knows that everything that went wrong in their lives had started here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written to fill The Second Coming’s Claim 275: They put up with Drexel for exactly two reasons: opium and orgies, for both of my fills, Duncan/Maggie/Miles in chapter one, and Bass/Miles/Nora in Chapter 2. This is Miles remembering his time in the abyss, so be warned: it gets dark. But also joyous by turns and perhaps ultimately hopeful?

It’s the damn dress that does it.

Miles has no idea how long something like that can last, but the minute he puts his hand on Charlie’s shoulder, the texture of it brings the memory rushing back. He’d been high, of course, every crevice of his body singing with the smoke, but he remembers the surprise of expecting lace and finding only nylon, a cheap, ugly surprise.

He had expected more, at Drexel’s. They put up with the man for exactly two reasons: opium and orgies. And neither came cheap.

The girl wearing the dress had been exquisite, lean and muscled but with breasts so high and round that even Bass had stopped to ask just how old she was. Nineteen, she’d said, and they’d looked at each other, knowing it for a lie, but stripped the dress off her anyway.

He’d like to say it was the opium, the way they’d fucked that girl half the night. He’d been raw in his skin, sure enough, and reality was a distant, mocking light, but he’d known she was too young. Known the stubborn set of her mouth spoke of a girl refusing to be victim, an uncommon type for a whore.

They’d gone out of their way to make it good for her, but he’s still surprised when she’s snuggled between them come morning. But if she was still between them … who was sitting on top of him? He’d squinted up through the opium fog to take in long, moonlight-coloured curls, milk-pale skin, and huge green eyes glaring out of a picture-portrait face, so fierce his cock had throbbed its approval. Shame about the knife.

“What sort of leaders like to fuck children?” Mama Bear had growled, and there’s no comeback for that, no possible defense, so told her to take the girl and go. But then Bass made a sleepy noise of protest beside him, even as he struck like a viper to grab the knife.

“Why shouldn’t I kill you both?” he’d asked, and Miles is listing the reasons to himself, trying not to boil them down to ‘because she’s right’ when the young girl, still naked between them, had kneeled up in panic.

“Because I’ll do anything. We’ll do anything,” she promised, and this time, he can’t even blame the drugs, or Bass, because he’s the one who makes the demand out of pure, unrestrained spite.

“Children, huh? Truth this time, kid. How old are you?”

“Sixteen. Sir.”

“And how old is blondie here?”

“Maggie? I don’t know, sir. Twenty-five maybe?”

The blonde objects, her cut glass accent tight with strain. “Thirty-one, actually.”

“Hmm. Guess you are a mama bear. Protector of lost children? That deserves a reward,” he grins, but whoever Maggie is, she’s not fooled, staring at him with dread.

Miles lets his gaze shift to the girl, forcing himself to notice the slight roundness of her face, and the bloom of childhood still on her skin. Sixteen. He’s shot men for less. But every day he lives this life, he searches for a boundary he’s not willing to cross. This horse had bolted even before he’d the chance to discover whether he’d found one yet.

Blondie really shouldn’t have put a knife to his throat.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Paige. Paige Duncan.”

“Well, Paige Duncan, you’re going to give Maggie here her reward. You’re gonna eat her out, and make sure she screams your name when she comes. Then she’s gonna open you up so we can fuck you, and when we’re done showing her just how much of a woman you are, she’s going to lick our cum out of your pussy and your ass, and beg our fucking forgiveness. Because that’s just the kind of leaders we are,” he says, voice heavy with mockery.

Maggie sobs through her humiliation, but young Paige surprises them both, shuddering through a wave of orgasms that crashes down the minute they start to rock her between them.

“Why? Why is it so good?” she had asked, green eyes full of confusion, and of all the things he has to hate himself for, how weird that this one stings the most. He’d pulled out of her, unable to answer, and it had been up to Bass to cuddle her close and explain.

“Different people like different things,” he’d soothed her, and “never let anyone make you ashamed for feeling good.”

Maybe Bass’ altruism is catching, or perhaps it’s some fancy conceived in the smoke that made them take the girl with them when they left. Maggie Foster, too, stony faced bitch that she was, but they’re in no position to turn down a doctor, especially one who is willing to trade right of passage for her services as a spy.

He should have joined the dots, he knows, when she walked into his bar and pretended not to know him. It had been him who sent her to Ben in the first place. But Charlie’s fierce golden beauty had knocked out his ability to think, and in that moment all he could think was that his every last sin had flown home to roost.

Except he’d been wrong. He’d forgotten about Nora. The woman who loved him, who always put him first, and suffered for it.

The irony isn’t lost on him, he wants to tell her. Everything that went wrong in their lives had started here. The drugs. The orgies. Their dazzling parade of addictions.

And now, she is lying close to death in the basement, her life hanging on a tenuous thread of goodwill, back in this place. They’d dug their own graves, he accepts.

But he’ll be fucked if he’s ready to surrender Nora to hers just yet.                        


	2. Chapter 2

 

His demons howl for blood as Miles stares at Charlie’s reflection in the mirror, and sees another face, darker, sharper, more sad. She’d been a girl, too, when they’d first brought her here. Not sixteen, not twenty one, but yet to unfurl into the full power of her womanhood.

He doesn’t have to ask himself whether they corrupted her. He knows they did.

Nora had come highly recommended as a bounty hunter, but no one had warned them about just how beautiful she was. Miles had taken one look at her and sent a messenger for Bass. The President, he explained, had taken a particular interest in her work.

“Uh huh,” she’d said, and looked away with a smirk.

They invite her to eat with them that night, and she’d declined so prettily that Bass hadn’t even bothered to pout. “She’s a good girl,” he’d sighed, and Miles had just gazed after her, wondering if the sister waiting at home was a fabrication.

When a grumpy younger version on Nora opened to his knock a week later, he’d conceded the point and invited them both.

“I’ll be away for work,” Nora had smiled, and he resisted the urge to revoke the contract.

Bass is off inspecting the newest addition to his empire when Miles first convinces Nora to eat with him, and that’s where the trouble starts.

He’s already half in love with her, she’s losing the will to resist, and he never thinks to explain exactly how things work with him and Bass.

Until their first trip to Drexel’s.

“What on earth is this place?” Nora asks, eyes wide, as they’re ushered into the grand foyer, half-dressed girls hanging over the balconies like exotic potplants.

“This, darling Nora, is the most exclusive brothel and opium den in the Monroe Republic,” Bass had pronounced. He’d bounced about the place like an over-excited puppy, Miles remembers, desperate to touch and taste everything in his path.

Nora had been appalled.

“We’ll lock ourselves in our room and get high together,” Miles had placated. “I don’t need anyone but you, babe.”

“But, in the past – you … you’ve done this. Like Bass is. With lots of girls.”

He hadn’t been able to hide the wince, and Nora had narrowed her eyes at him in a silent demand for the truth.

“Yeah. Mostly just me and Bass and a couple of girls. Three at the most. Though once – okay, four.”

 

She’d punched him. Later though, when they’d been mellow on grass but not yet blitzed on opium, her curiosity got the better of her.

“Is that something you’ve wanted? You and me and Bass?”

He’d thought about lying, but he reckoned she already knew he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about it.

He took a deep breath and waded into the ugly truth. “That’s all I wanted, at first. Kinda – how we did things. But then …” he had shrugged, the words sticking in his throat, not for the first time. He loved her. He knew it, and he hoped she knew it.

Because he had never been able to say the words.

And now, Nora lays dying and he still hasn’t, he flagellates himself. He’s never told her that she was the first person he’d wanted to keep for himself. The first person who really existed for him outside of Bass.

The only person to ever look at his relationship with Bass and understand how terrifying it was, so much naked, heedless devotion.

That first night at Drexels, she had snuggled into him and dragged out secrets he had told anyone else, even Bass. The glory of drowning in a tide of opium as soft hands all over your body dragged you into the beyond. The way every cell in his body would shudder with delight when his cock found a warm, wet welcome. How the pleasure was magnified tenfold when he could share the experience with his brother, their cocks caressing each other through a thin wall of skin.

“I want to watch first,” she said.

He gave her a day to back out before he told Bass.

The blue eyes had fired slowly, and Miles had almost smiled as his lover (his leader, his brother) had tried to look disinterested.

“If that’s what she wants, Miles. If that’s what _you_ want.”

He hadn’t missed the rebuke – once, Bass had never had to guess at what Miles wanted – but promised himself he’d deal with it later. It’s had been nearly six months since he’d been with Bass, and to share him with Nora … anticipation was clawing at him like a Fallujah alleycat.

“Tonight, then?”

“Tonight.”

They’d locked themselves in Miles and Nora’s room and sipped on top-shelf whiskey as Bass lit the pipe. “Ladies first,” Bass had smiled, and had held it to her lips as Nora took her first, unsteady lungful.

Then he’d brought it across to Miles and his lips, his lips … they’d never shared the pipe, he and Bass. They took the smoke from each other’s mouths, trading it back and forth, loving the way their favourite high came flavoured with their favourite taste.

Bass is licking his chest by the time Miles starts to fly, his tongue passing over him in long, wet stripes of brightly coloured sensation. His hair, Miles smiles, is a familiar, fiery blue, even if he can’t recall where he’s seen that colour before. His skin is a sad, monotone black, though, he tries to explain, and Bass laughs and laughs and laughs until suddenly, he’s all gold and pink.

Miles crawls over to where Nora is sitting in the chair at the end of the bed, and rhapsodises about the colour for a minute before lurching back to Bass. There’s a giggle in the room, suggesting they should have taken their clothes off, and he wonders who else is floating in his bubble until Bass hands – Bass! Bass! Bass! – land on his hips.

“Put your head in Nora’s lap,” he whispered (or possibly shouted). “But remember. She was the one who said she just wanted to watch. Make her pay for it.”

“Mmmm,” Miles agreed, and it’s the thing he remembers most from that first visit to Drexel’s – Nora’s beautiful eyes, endless pools of black that still managed to look by turns shocked, and jealous, and hungry as Bass fucked him. She didn’t beg the way Bass clearly expected her to, but he could feel the heat rising from her, and taste her want in the air.

Maybe not tonight, but soon, he remembers thinking.

Nora being the stubborn, contrary womanchild that she is, makes them wait. It was the last night of their first visit, and most of Drexel’s whores had enjoyed the longest vacation they were ever likely to get, Nora making it clear than she needed to be the only woman in either of their beds if this was ever to happen.

There were other rules too.   Just like their dalliance with opium, the threesome would only ever happen at Drexel’s, and would never be spoken of outside of that room. Philadelphia was their life, and this was their escape – not their normal.

He and Bass practically yelled their assent, then stripped her between them, hands and mouths colliding in their frenzy to convince her of the wisdom of her decision. Nora had scolded them, told them to slow the fuck down – more a marathon, less a sprint, she’d said, bringing their hands to back to her body with a smirk that got them back in line real quick.

At the time, he’d thought she had all the power. They’d put themselves under her command, offered their lips and tongues and cocks up as mere instruments for her pleasure, and she’d ordered them around with a husky enjoyment that he knew she couldn’t fake.

The orgasms – they’d stopped counting after the fifth - were pretty damn convincing, too. It had been a near religious experience for him, sharing the rich bounty of the woman he loved with the man who held his soul, but had it been the right thing for Nora?

Could anything that ever happened in this house emerge untainted?

Miles fights his way free of the past to find Charlie still staring into the mirror, eyes unseeing as her hands pull convulsively at the lurid scrap of a dress. If anyone could escape Drexel’s corruption, it would be Charlie.

His hands move restlessly on her shoulders, and he meets her eyes in the mirror. “No. You’re not doing this. We’ll find another way.”

Perhaps Charlie can be the girl he won’t let down. The innocent he won’t debauch. The boundary he will not cross.

Her mouth sets into a pugnacious line, and she tells him she can’t let Nora die. He agrees wholeheartedly, but says they need a better plan. One that rights the wrong he and Bass committed so many years ago when they let their most base needs stop them from crushing this cockroach.

There’s a demon waiting for him behind every door in this damn house – too many memories, too much weakness, too many lines crossed – but he’s done letting them fuck him over. It might have taken Maggie, and Nora, and Charlie to make him realise it, but all he’s ever done is feed them.

Time to grow a backbone, believe in himself a little, and cut them down to size.

Starting with Drexel.

_fin_


End file.
